


Quiet

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Category: Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Citadel Arc-Obi-Wan is Captured, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Healing, Hints of Anakin's Issues, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e18 The Citadel, Rescue, Self-Reflection, Unclear if Romance is one-sided or not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24512809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: After Obi-Wan is captured during the attempted extraction of Master Koth from the Citadel, Commander Cody finds himself caught betwween long moments of silence.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 5
Kudos: 219





	Quiet

Cody thought he would hear screaming. He had the sounds of dying men his entire existence, from the shocked and pained gasps of brothers he had who were lost in accidents on Kamino to the grit-laden screams of those who died with their guns blazing on forgotten battlefields across the galaxy. He knew the screams that were laden with agony, the gurgling as his men swallowed lungfuls of their own blood until it finally drowned them, the whimpers of the ones who clung to life for a few moments longer than they perhaps should have, eeking out seconds of pain for a final chance to see the sun overhead or a familiar face that might still hold some kindness. His ears, it seemed, were ready for the screams; for wails even, or some guttural expression of agony.

Instead there was silence. His blood roared in his ears at the quietness of it, waiting on some viper to strike. General Skywalker was running the distraction at the front gates, but the noises of battle were far behind Cody, at the end of a string of droids that he had taken out with quick, silent shots of his blaster. In this hallway, one of the overheard lights flickering as it swung on its wires from the ceiling that had been knocked loose in their initial assault.

Cody’s ears roared in the quiet, blood pulsing through them at rate that only his heat could hope to match. He swallowed, slamming a fist into the access panel, listening for some reaction. No sound followed. No confused droid, no sound of torture on the other side of the door. Pressed back against the wall, he granted himself a moment of acknowledged naivety that perhaps they had come fast enough. That he wouldn’t find something battered or broken. That the rumors about the Citadel were exagerrated and the fear that had been writ large on General Skywalker’s face had been for nothing.

He ducked into the room, checking his corners and sides for any wayward guard droids, but the plan thus far had been flawless and the entire sect of the Citadel guard was fighting to preserve the integrity of the front gates. He lowered his gun, waiting for some sign of acknowledgement from the man hanging above him. It was as if Obi-Wan were in suspended animation, his hands and fingers held aloft by strings controlled by some out of sight puppeteer.

“General,” He said but the man did not move. Not enough the slightest twitch to show that he knew that Cody was there. That Cody had come to rescue him. That Cody never should have not been part of the original mission to begin with. “General Kenobi.”

It was the Kenobi that woke him, Cody realized later. How often had his torturers said his name to him as they worked their way over his body? Cody didn’t want to imagine that. That the panic he saw in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s face as he startled awake, flinching away from torture that Cody could fiercely guarantee would never come again, was nothing more than a fluke. He didn’t want to imagine the way that vibroblade had sliced through Obi-Wan’s pale skin, the way what seemed to be an electrowhip had blistered the skin of his back, the way an electrostaff had burned two dozen holes through his shirt and the skin beneath as they said his name over and over and over. The Negotiatior, brought to his knees. Abandoned. Hopeless. Kenobi. Kenobi. Kenobi. Cody didn’t want to think about those moments.

But it was far too quiet to think of anything else.

* * *

“Obi-Wan!” Skywalker’s scream is the first thing that Cody really hears. He didn’t mean to bring the General out like this, cradling him to his chest as his body went went limp and slumped against Cody. His general should get to look strong, to show what the strength that Cody knew that he possessed, the strength he had to posses to have survived these past weeks before they launched their counter invasion. Instead, he had no choice but to carry him this way, keep the blood trickling from his mouth from running down his throat and instead letting it coat a thin line down the front of Cody’s armor. He had to keep his hands off the worse of the burns and the bruises and the broken ribs, but it wasn’t possible and he could feel the damage shifting further under his fingers as he tried so desperately to carry him to safety.

He didn’t stop though, not even for Skywalker who charged towards him, eviscerating droids and guards alike. Cody moved towards the ship, towards medicine, towards a place to set his General down and where he could pretend not to collapse under the weight of everything laying on him in the moment.

“Obi-Wan!” Cody knew that cry to. It was the cry of a desperate man. Angry, bitter, hopeful, already grieving even if he didn’t realize it. General Skywalker, he knew, was a desperate man. “Ahsoka, hold the field.”

He made it to the ship ramp the same time as Cody, and Cody could see that he wanted to take Obi-Wan from Cody’s arms, to feel the life coursing through him and tell himself that everything was going to be okay. “I’ll take him in, Sir,” Cody said, his own voice the softest he had ever heard it, “Once the field is clear, we can fly out of here.”

Skywalker’s eyes flashed with renewed anger, the kind Cody had never seen in a Jedi, with each inch of his masters body that he took in with his eyes. “This wont take long,” He said, in such a solemn promise that Cody could not doubt him. He continued on board, the sounds of battle blurring behind him as he moved to the med port, towards the cold metal table that he laid his general’s body on with all the gentle care he could manage, turning his head to the side so that the trickle of blood—no thicker or thinner than it had been when he had first caught Obi-Wan as he fell out of his suspension restraints—began to bead and pool on the table, staining a fresh red line through his beard.

As Cody waited, on someone to return, on someone to help him, the quiet of the ship, of Obi-Wan’s labored but soft breathing, was overwhelming. He wanted to scream, if only to hear something else.

* * *

The Med Bay at the Jedi temple was unlike any place that Cody had been before. It was designed for tranquility, for connection to the living force and self-healing through that connection. It teemed with life, as if it were some organism itself with a beating heart just beneath the area that keep the pulse of it in motion. The walls and rooms were lined with plants and crisp white linens and tapestries so ancient that Cody was certain if he touches one it would turn to dust in his fingers. His general looked out of place here.

He was amongst all the white linens, lying still as if he might be sleeping, hair and beard washed and trimmed and combed over his face in the way he kept it. They had dressed him in the same white linens that the rest of the patients Cody had seen were always wearing, but rather than stay the linen white they were when they started, he had seem them change the tunic twice already since he had arrived. Wounds that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Burns that clung to the fabric no matter how much of the skin they had removed and started to regrow. Bruises that gave the appearance of shadow underneath the fabric or were highlighted against the gauntness of his face where starvation had gleaned any extra fat, of which there was already very little, and started to eat away at the muscle tissue underneath.

It was Skywalker who told him the depth of the torture. The Jedi Council had taken his debriefing, but had not given him any information on anything beyond that other than that he would be on Coruscant for the foreseeable future while they worked on the next assignment for his company. But Skywalker…Cody didn’t understand Skywalker. Didn’t know what he knew.

Did he know about Cody? That Cody harbored thoughts that were not only unbecoming for a Commanding Officer, but that, for a Jedi, went against everything that their moral code stood for. Did he know that Cody’s dreams, for nearly two years, had been possessed by such an agonizing fear of loss that when they told him Obi-Wan had been taken, it felt like they had torn out one of the chambers of Cody’s heart that kept him alive until it had been replaced with the fire he had needed to rescue him? Did Skywalker know that? Could he, also a Jedi, see love when it was there in front of him? Even if it was coming from a clone, built to serve at the whims of the Jedi?

But it was Skywalker who had come to him. _You deserve to know,_ he had said, and repeated every detail off of the write-up sheet until Cody had wanted to beg him to stop at the same time he wanted to shake him and demand more details. Perhaps the worst of was the non-responsiveness. That Obi-Wan still hadn’t woken up. That it had only been a split second of terror when he thought Cody was there to torture him further that had seen him awake and alive in nearly two weeks. And Skywalker had told him where he could come.

And come he did, his feet carrying him to the Med Bay from his quarters in the dead of night when his brothers were snoring and there was nothing he would have liked to do more than sleep and dream a pleasant dream about his general like the ones he had dreamed after Ryloth. Those were the moments that he found himself walking through the tranquility that the Jedi had constructed to facilitate healing. In the middle of the night, it was so quiet that Cody could hear the clicking of the doctor who came in to work reception as she filled out form after form after form to update medical records.

He walked to where he could see Obi-Wan through the plexiglass, sometimes, on nights when he could feel himself heat with anger as Obi-Wan’s white linen robes began to spot with blood and bile, he would press his forehead to the glass, longing to open his eyes again and see his generals looking back at him. On those nights it was quiet, and his own breath sounded in his ears and was warm blowing back from the glass to his face.

Tonight his feet found their path. But the quietness, the serenity, that he had come to expect was gone. He watched, eyes blown, as a team of medics worked over Obi-Wan, holding him to the bed. Eyes still closed, he was unconscious. Thrashing wildly against the healers. His mouth opening and screams tearing through the air and sinking through to Cody’s bones.

* * *

Three weeks it had taken them to figure out the force suppressors in his bloodstream. Hampering his progress, keeping him unconscious, forcing him to relive his prolonged torture over and over and over again in his head until he had snapped that night that Cody had seen him. It was Skywalker again who had told him this, in the Rec Center before he had lifted a table off the ground and smashed it against the far wall, squeezing the metal through the force with his outstretched hand until it was a crushed ball on the floor. For every bit that Cody was fearful, Skywalker was pure fury. He had been forced to wait to launch a rescue of Obi-Wan to begin with, and now they couldn’t’ even heal the wounds that he had been forced to endure as a result. Cody had to marvel at how deeply the general could feel his emotions: The Jedi were notoriously reserved, but as he unleashed his anger onto the rest of the rec equipment, Cody wondered what else about the order might be a façade. He wondered if he, as a clone of a man, was capable of that much uninhibited rage. Thinking of Obi-Wan’s screaming, he thought that he certainly was.

It took Commander Tano to calm him down, to lead him out of the room to eat dinner in the Jedi mess hall and attempt some form of meditation. When they left, there was no one left to calm down Cody. 

* * *

His general woke up almost exactly five weeks after he had arrived back on Corsuscant. Cody was hardly the first to get to see him. He ranked, in terms of importance, well below anyone who might have wanted to go before him. But he could wait. He had been waiting for so long already. And when finally, the ward was empty after they had near forcibly dragged General Skywalker away on some flasfied business, Cody started the familiar trek to Obi-Wan’s room. He was still wearing the white linens, but they didn’t color under Cody’s eyes, staying clear and crisp even as they crinkled and folded around his body. He was sitting up, the head of his bed lifted to where it supported him. Thin tubes of oxygen still ran to his nose, thinner tubes of liquid dripped into his arms from bags suspended above him that held medicines Cody had never heard of and could not, let alone, pronounce.

“Cody,” His general’s voice was weak, so weak that Cody thought it might have at first been wishful thinking until it came again. “I hoped you would come.”

Cody did not know what heartbreak felt like. His brothers had been raised together, nothing of them having a chance to find love until they had been thrust out into the world. And then their primary interactions were with their Jedi. They should not love Jedi. None of them could tell him what heartbreak was, what it felt like to have your chest splinter in half or your intestines squeezed in a vice grip or that small flutter that his chest made when his general had said that. That through the pain, there was a tiny flame, stoked by those words, that warmed him from head to toe.

“Of course, General,” He hesitated, and watched Obi-Wan’s eyes, strikingly blue against the gauntness of his features, try to fix on him even as they were glazed over with a mix of pain and medication. “I…I wanted to see you.”

“You’ve come before now,” Obi-Wan said softly. “To see me.” He sounded on the edge of sleep or some sort of equivalent oblivion, but his words made Cody swallow back a bursting ache that throbbed in his chest.

“Yes, sir,” He said. Should he tell him the rest? Tell him all of it? “Every night.”

“I thought so,” His eyes closed, head turned towards Cody but pressed back against the soft pillow, “I could feel you near me.”

* * *

They were set to leave on their first mission the next morning. Something small, where Obi-Wan would excel in his ability to negotiate and the fighting would likely be at a minimal. A softball mission, one that could have been handled by a Jedi Padawan and handful of clones. Cody wasn’t sure if he was grateful or not.

His general was back on his feet again, and he had seen him in the sparring ring with General Skywalker with increasing frequency. But he was not…back, yet. He was stiffer, some movement exaggerated while others barely seemed to happen. Lost on some of the Shinies, who thought he was moving with extraordinary grace. But Cody had seen him move with the sort of grace that was granted only to Jedi, and only to those Jedi who took care to practice it, and this by comparison looked almost haphazard.

He had to wonder if he would be normal again. At night, when Cody let himself think of such things, he thought about the list of injuries. Thought about the scar tissue that must have grown and spread and encased bones and organs and so many pieces of Obi-Wan that it was hard not think of it as a thick, white spider web being spun beneath his skin.

“Cody,” He turned at the call of his own name, his general standing there, the slightest tinge of color back on his face. “Are you ready for the morning, Cody?”

“Are we ever, General?”

And his general laughed, a simple sweet sound. Cody walked with him, hoping that that night, the dreams of spiders and screams would leave him and he might dream of that moment instead. Or perhaps his dream would be quiet. He would give nearly anything for a single night of quiet. Watching the slight hitch in Obi-Wan’s step as they crossed the threshold of the doorway to the main hangar, he thought that was not a realistic dream.


End file.
